I hope this reconnection doesn't put him into a situation he fled from and start a recycle of abuse. I hope he gets the help he needs, which is hard for autistic adults especially getting out into the world this way. Just because he was homeless and pushing a cart, doesn't mean he doesn't know how the world treats him and he had the ability to do his best not to give his name. He will likely repeat similar transient behavior. Which maybe that's not the worst thing in the world if he can get some better care. I know some delightful autistic hobos. The world doesn't want them for normal jobs and they're perfectly happy to camp, hop trains, and sing songs. It's a dangerous life but it's not a wrong life to choose. I don't need to know the drama of his struggle, but I just really hope people that can help him find a life that is less cold and more fulfilling and whoever put in him the need to walk away doesn't get to put that on him again.
This is weird for me to read because years ago I met someone like this, and it always puzzled me. He just came up to me downtown one night and started chatting. He struck me as a little out there, kind of hippy-dippy. Seemed in good spirits. One of my neighbors knew him from a party. We all hung out with a few other people I didn't know. (At which time a middle-aged preacher uppercut a 6'5' drunk fireman so hard his feet left the ground and he landed on his head.) He crashed at my apartment. We hung out again the next day, and then he just disappeared.
I didn't think much of it. I'd 'come up' with a bunch of neurotypical 'transients' with sad family lives who partied and crashed where they could.
A couple of years later I thought maybe I'd look him up. I found a few news articles stating he (an adult) was "missing", autistic, and "ran away" from his "caregiver." Stated that he "functioned at a 12-year-old level." The autism part maybe explained some eccentricity, but I could not square that last part with the person I'd met. He seemed to know what he was doing (?) Based on the articles, he'd run away at least twice. No mention of parents, only a "caregiver."
It was just weird. He was very, very chill, and very chatty. He didn't seem in distress. I suppose one could recast my first impression of rambling free-spiritedness as "functioning at the level of a 12-year-old"...? Just odd. I never did find a way to contact him.
To NT people not conforming to or recognizing/acknowledging social structures anchors your cognition at an adolescent level where that type of behavior is acceptable. Teens are expected to conform and some people on the spectrum can be completely “normal” in every other way, but if you asked that person to show up to a job at 8am every day or to do X socially expected thing, they’d probably just go find someone else to talk to, hence the “functioning at a 12 year old level.” I consider this to be oppressive social pressure and I’m lucky I was privilege enough to live this way without being shamed or tormented by my family. We should all function at the level of a 12 year old.
I get your point but I wouldn’t consider things like not being able to show up at work “functioning at a 12 year old level”, and i don’t think society would either.
Plenty of “neurotypical” adults suck at showing up to things on time, especially at 8am. Plenty of adults throw full-on tantrums or otherwise act like children in certain situations. Plenty of college students don’t know how to do simple things like wash their clothes or cook or keep their dorm clean. Honestly a lot of people can barely function alone and keep their shit together, and I wouldn’t be surprised if that person was one of them, but we don’t look at them like 12-year olds.
I agree - I was using a specific example but in practice I think it's a number of a class of things like this that pile on and look a lot like executive dysfunction, and the label is put on these people by NTs, not by themselves. I had no problem showing up to work every day at 11am, fwiw, and was lucky enough to have a lot of jobs that didn't think too hard about schedules, but for folks not so lucky, not fitting the average in a number of ways will get you very crude labels. Those labels are to give their caretakers power over them in the eyes of society/legally.
Agreed. These labels work because for the most part the legal system allows them to, they are ways for caregivers/parents to maintain control over someone that they think should be different.
Trigger Warning: Gonna talk about sexual assault and physical abuse below.
"caregiver" is a big red flag for me. I'm on the autistic spectrum. My parents took a different tact and let me become an emancipated minor at 15. I'm not gonna say they did their best or that that was a good thing to do... I cannot as an adult fathom just letting the kid go to the wolves... but I survived.
There is a massive contingent of people that HATE autistic people and feel like it's something to be "fixed". A lot of them frame that hate as helping.
There are tons of laws and very questionable care giving organizations. The history is brutal. Frequently they are handed over to people who get into the role of caring for these people because they want to beat and rape people who can't complain (see Jimmy Savile). This isn't that dissimilar from the highly publicize Britany Spears conservatorship. There is money in taking care of an adult with "the mind of a 12 year old" also you can beat and rape them if you wanna.
There is an old and "hippie dippie" model for spectrum disorders where they refer to them as indigo children and they claim that kids used to be called that because the baby was replaced by fairies and now speaks truths beyond their years. Look at the classic traits of a vampire. Being scared of water, can count things very fast, maybe has surprising strength and old wisdom.
Autistic people aren't extra wise, they span the range of dipshit to genius like any other category of people. Autistic people do spend a lot of extra energy trying to predict a world that is confusing and hostile to them and when they vocalize how they navigate said world, it creeps people out who have to deal with a society that says lying is wrong but the rule actually is "fuck it, do whatever you can get away with."
If you get hooked up to "caregivers" that take away your agency and you are an outlet of justifiable (to the abuser) sadism for them you can't run far enough. The state will put you back in their arms.
Autism Speaks is a eugenics organization. Autism does not mean a person is unaware of the world around them, actually quite the opposite. Also the messaging that autism can be a super power is the same thing in disguise (see the most recent Predator movie or Baby Driver). It's a sensory disorder. It's not a lack of emotion, it's that overload frequently makes it difficult to respond to people and situations as "normal people" expect so abuse becomes a default mode for "caregivers". There are organizations that are CURRENTLY advocating for electric shock or physical harm to help "correct" autism.
Yeah... (speaking about the perspective of a hypothetical person in a situation of abuse) Change your name, run away, hop trains. RUN if you can because you're autistic enough to see that people will always abuse you in any situation where you're put into the care of the ghouls that own your name. Even the Arc and Autism Self Advocacy Network have some massive problems including putting autistic people with weird abusive special interests into positions to hurt people who just want to live their fucking lives.
I recently saw this video by a fellow I really relate to where he lays out all the things I say in a fit some times but... yeah. They lay it all out. The history of helping the disabled is pretty wrought with not checking in with the disabled. Also, I think they are a hilarious humorist and the rest of their stuff is fun.
Ha! This video is what I needed right now for a few reasons. Thanks. Yes, I am on the spectrum, and so is my brother, and so is my father. I wasn't diagnosed until my late 30s, but 1) I had plenty of other things to blame, and 2) I more or less 'knew' since my teens, but autism was not widely discussed then, and I didn't identify with that label at all. Internally I simply identified as a space alien from another planet sent here to observe humans. It helped me explain to myself my need to study people very carefully to form a theory of their words and actions. I just studied people silently for years, never saying much. After high school I found some friends who appreciated me enough to bring me into situations where I could imitate them and slowly begin to practice masking.
My father was not very involved because my mother didn't want him to be. To this day she is enraged that she was suckered into marrying a defective person because she felt sorry for him. She booted me out the house at 18. I was quasi-homeless for the next few years, sleeping in my car, at friends', sometimes at my grandparents'. Nothing permanent. I'm going to cut this story short because it doesn't really go anywhere. 2006-2012 were pretty good for me, and by conventional measures too.
I've been entangled with the mental health system too many times to list. It's a fraught fucking thing. A real mind-fuck. We didn't have the word 'gaslighting' in those days.
I've had very little interaction in life with people I relate to, other than my brother. That's why this video is ... relieving, or something like that.
If you ever wanna talk, hit me up! Community is important! Kindness is infectious. Check my profile if you feel like you wanna reach out. I've been kind of working on an internet generative pen and paper style role playing chat gizmo (who isn't right?) but also... Yeah man, that family stuff is typical honestly and it sounds like your mother and father had a lot of hurt because they couldn't connect. We have the luxury of doing better because we can know different things because internet.
No matter what, guard your grill with your fam but they did what they could and are flawed like the rest of us. Tigers won't change their stripes. Be who you gotta be and try to share some comfort and kindness where you can. Also give Whooligan a like and follow if you think of it. They don't have a lot of attention and I think they do solid effort and deserve more.
I detect a very familiar kind of traumatic shock in this story here. I currently experience manic terror masked by what looks like jokey beats told rapidly on loop for what I suspect are similar reasons. Who failed you doesn't have to define you though. They will probably still fail you but, probably they don't want to and don't know how to be different and wish they could be. Not your problem to fix. Because you're human and talking to me right now I think I can say with very strong confidence that your chosen family needs you to slow down the tape enough to share your light.
It makes me pretty happy that this video resonated with you. Find your people, be kind, know yourself. Guard your grill because the world is getting weirder. You're a goldmine and ghouls wanna deplete you. Surround yourself with folks that value your modes and can help you with the parts you don't get that well and you can trust to tell you the truth. Rinse, repeat.
I'm sorry if that's preachy sounding, but everything feels like hell to me today. I very much feel for your struggle how you explained it friend.
Just wanted to show my support to @psyc and you (@stuntkite). I come from a mildly dysfunctional family and while everything worked out fine in the end it made me quite sensitive to these issues and I am aware of the struggle. Big hug, guys!
Thanks for sharing @stuntkite @psyc! Sometimes a read (like these posts) come as quite a reality check to someone who comes from family with no big issues and who had it generally quite protected in life. All the best to you and stay strong!
Well thank you for saying so, and yes I tell my story in part to prick the Just World / The System Works bubble that I perceive as predominating around these parts. Like, to me, I might casually mention I started working at age 8, and someone responds “Uh, that is child labor.” To which I reply, no shit it’s child labor. By 12 I was putting in 40 hour weeks during summer, under the table, for a respected professional pillar of the community. And someone will say, “This happened in America? Exploitation!” Well maybe, but to me it was a godsend, and the one and only reason I was able to buy my first computer and learn programming. Of course that isn’t how it would go in an ideal world, but how can anyone mistake this world for an ideal one? You answered that question. And my early life (on second thought, the rest of it too) wasn’t all-ghetto either. It was always very checkered. Every part had aspects of real privilege and real poverty. Maybe the only thing it didn’t have was any consistency :)
On a different note, it just occurred to me that we talk a lot about impostor syndrome, but never about the kind I had. Usually it’s about one’s skills and ability. I never had that, but I had it really, really hard about my class, and that never went away, either.
Thanks, psyc. I'm really glad I was able to ... connect? lol ... how do talk person? I was going to say comfort you, but I dunno... it felt weird to say. I'm glad you can relate and got something out of it. How's that? Am I doing this right?
Relationship with your mom sounds awful... I'm strained with both of my parents for different reasons.
Hey, it’s you! I watched all 2.5 hours of your vid last night and it was fantastic for too many reasons. Let’s just say I’m going through some things, and I am underinformed about some other things. So thank you and thanks stuntkite.
I'm a few more shades more conservative (Read: self-hating) than the guy in that video but I can't stop laughing.
I'm at the point where he's talking about how he suspected he should get diagnosis's from two doctors to get on disability and he was right and he was told to go to a third doctor anyways. It might be hard for people to relate to how I've had to have a hard talk with people that they will likely have to fight for years to get on disability assistance regardless of if they're legitimately disabled and that you can be too disabled and lacking in support to get through the system to get disability support. I know why things are like that but it doesn't make it any less cruelly ironic.
It's pretty wild isn't it? I learned how to mask pretty dang well at puberty and I didn't really start being totally drained by it until my mid 20s. I got diagnosed around 30 and I also "live with" ADHD and some other comorbid brain worms and because of the nature of my job move states a lot and need a new GP. It's crazy how many will decide to totally re-evaluate me. Like seriously bro, I've been on these meds for eight years. If you fuck with my timing while I'm trying to unpack and start a new job literally everything could be very fucked. It's cool that you hate me and this state hates me too.
The magic words just about anywhere I've found are "this is effecting my job" and you just get whatever treatment you asked for. But if I overly autistically explain anything they wanna run me through the shredder and set new appointments. "You just don't seem autistic." Yeah... do you know how these tests work also I'm hyper-vigialant masking right now because it's 7:30AM on a monday and I just met you.
Is this a time where I could have used the word Kafkaesque and it actually applies? I'm half drunk and don't know where that would fit in. I've got little tiny bug feet. I don't really know what bugs eat.
> you can be too disabled and lacking in support to get through the system to get disability support
This 1000 times. I’d be on the street if not for the wherewithal to complete a grueling application, and an address to stay at where they could send the rejection and appeal letters 18 months later. Because of that, I am comfortable, while the homeless are homeless even though they may equally qualify. Safety net has too large holes.
I ... my childhood was fucking weird... I thankfully never dealt with malicious caregivers, but I know now that both of my parents were autistic and undiagnosed. My care was mostly severe neglect... I say it was bizarre, because I went to an expensive summer camp like $6k/yr if I remember correctly, but that was the only time I knew support and community as a child. Back at home, while my parents were millionaires (not anymore), I lived alone with my mom in a hoarding house with multiple holes in the roof and infested with both racoons and rats. So yeah... a distinct lack of socializing experience didn't help me.
You responded to my youtube comment with that "let me know if I can help with anything" when I first watched your video and gushed a bit. I gather that you decided to do that because you're an internet professional and because of the things you talked about in that video. It was shocking, and where I can determine it's context appropriate I've been applying it.
I'm going to take you up on that. I want to get you to look at my sort of janky WebRTC+XMPP+Unity3D remote D&D... not game... more like puppet show... thing. heh. It is NOT my day job.
I've got a contingent of computer professionals and people I've played D&D with not working on it but playing along while I sort it out. I've got a really pretty OK chat bot foundation for it that is like the old BBS game Legend of the Red Dragon with forrest fights and stuff... but it's backed by a well groomed and totally NOT distributable database a friend made of the Pathfinder SRD and a pretty cool magic item and name generator I made. It's a containerized django project originally running an IRC bot that I have now ported to Discord... which I dislike but am ... whatever. Anyway.
Come look at my chat bot and meet my nerd friends (it's like six of us on a good day) and look at the 3D broken puppet show I put on top of it please. I would really like that.
I will ping you on twitter. I don't want to cross this account with the one I'm going to send you contact from on twitter... I guess since you asked if you could help, check my profile and shoot me a hello via email so I can confirm my identity easily. Please. If you don't get to doing that, we can do that later. I don't wanna be a chore.
Cheers. I really, really appreciate your work. It's effervescent. I've sent it to a dozen people personally and a few of them that are NT actually watched it and they enjoyed it but really, more importantly, you put things into place for them that I'm talking about but they don't get when it's just coming from me and it's made my life a lot easier in some places.
Also, can I buy you a new microphone? I would like to do that. I don't think it needs to be anything extravagant, but I'm an audio professional and your audio quality muddles the message and can be over stimulating at times even though I know what you said at source was great. Your video editing is tops. Let me buy you a mic. We can chat about what works for you in your setup and I'll find the perfect one.
EDIT: This is kind of the forum for I'd guess a lot of people on the spectrum or however we say it. I did not expect this to blow up but I really can't express how happy it makes me that so many the people discussing things here are talking about how much your video connected with them. That was a hard video to make. I think what you put together is going to help so many people and I really see it here. To type this gets my face all twisted and crylike which isn't my thing. Really. Thank you.
Oh, that's awesome that it helped your NT friends understand! :D
That was my goal with the video, even though I thought it was somewhat "lofty". lol
This is the first time I've been on the ycombinator forum. I created the account just to respond to this thread. I'm happy to reply here, although I may be slower to reply here than on Twitter.
I forgot to mention earlier that my lapel mic died in the middle of filming and I had to replace it... so some of that audio distortion on the video is likely because the original mic was failing at the time.
Thanks for your trigger warning. I did not read your message. I am replying notwithstanding. I actually had to write this in a different application because when I tried replying to your comment, I couldn't actually hide it from view, and I saw the words 'special interests' and others, couldn't resize the window right, so opened another app to write.
Dude so in Chile, most of the world, a guardian can pay a shrink (a malpracticing psychiatrist, that's what that means) $400.000 (like $500) and he or she will 100% accuse him of any condition desired. Will. In United States the price is higher, depends on the state, basically on the chance of getting caught, and good psychs will just refuse. But they won't turn the guardian in, the good psychs are not in charge, the shrinks are in charge (like the Sacklers, being a shrink can make you a billionaire[1]). But a shrink can diagnose bipolar, schizophrenia, cannot take care of himself, retardation[2], what are the others...autism...paranoia...early-onset dementia...um...I read so many books about these things, why am I having a hard time rattling them all off...but at any rate, these are not diagnoses. They are also accusations. If false and public, they are slander. They justify harm, you can justify brain surgery, like a lobotomy but with better marketing. Same as an accusation can justify harm, putting someone in prison. And turns out, they all make the pretense of being scientific, but none of them are falsifiable (you have no way of proving them false), so why bother calling psychs who use them doctors if they're not even scientists? (Psychs is a more neutral term than shrink, psychiatrist is too big a word, takes too long to say, and means 'attendant of the soul' which is innacurate.)
And there are some great psychs. Just a minority by design.
[1] If you actually do the math, the three Sackler brothers are each a trillionaire debtor because that's the poverty value of the suffering they inflicted. Thousands of 13th amendment violations, making people addicts means making them slaves, they made hundreds of thousands of Americans slaves. Just through psychiatric malpractice, by definition being a shrink.
[2] This one is dangerous because if you diagnose retardation and the retard gets the best score in the country on the SAT, you might not look so smart yourself.
So my mother did this to me once. She didn't pay him - he was a friend from her church. He committed me as a favor to her. I was actually in a pretty good place at that time mood-wise. 100% not a danger to self / others. But she thought it a clever way to get me gone without the guilt of putting me on the street. Neither said a word beforehand. Surprise! The feeling of betrayal was indescribable.
They held me for a miserable month. The justification given by the hospital doc was I "Didn't have a plan." That last bit can be good or bad depending on their assessment of your plans.
yes, I'm fortunate to have a very good doc now. I've had a few decent ones. Most could be replaced by a kiosk - take a quiz, dispense Big Pharma pills.
> The justification given by the hospital doc was I "Didn't have a plan."
Can you give more context? Generally if someone is suicidal, “having a plan” is not a good thing, because it is beyond a vague intent, and it is a very strong signal of danger. Depressed people are queried about plans to help judge the possibility of suicide: you imply that was the risk that your mother was worried about.
That's the chink in the armor right there, you're being super assumptive about his mother saying she was worried when obviously "you" have never met her. He's known her his whole life you get your impression of her from him and you think you know more about her than he does? Most charitable interpretation of what you said: her soul can be compressed down to a hundred bytes. That says everything.
So that's why I still like Hacker News, dude your suffering has worth, they didn't respect you, your rights, nothing, and it was wrong. Well maybe show don't tell, I have a letter that talks about my stay in a psych ward, 75 days, which seemed like 45 days because of the amnestic drugs, and the exact mistake was talking about it like they didn't want me to know to say it was "coercion", that I was being kept in "some kind of prison." But it's crazy, the "fuck the law" false incarceration doesn't end with just the act of it, and the refusal to allow even a Bible into the ward, it goes farther, like making me blind to lawyer advertisements I would love to reply to if only I could read them, they gave me banner blindness specifically for lawyer ads, like they didn't register until yesterday, at any rate, the "fuck the law" means they can keep you out of the courtroom forever. Forever. And nobody wants to look at your evidence, or hear your testimony, look at confessions, the level to which they treat your problem as unworthy of human attention is unreal. No wonder brain surgeons never get sued for malpractice by their own patients, they see it coming and they lobotimize them before they make it to the courtroom. I got lobotomized for precisely that reason, and it works like a charm, I have no idea how I'll ever get a lawyer to talk to me for more than an hour (it's not enough time), or being unable to tell the fact chronologically (again because I was conditioned to behave erratically in the presence of lawyers). I will say I am coherent in the presence of judges, so I did great in small claims, like the curse they put on me had a loophole they didn't think of, what if I write a letter to a judge? Can't figure out how to do that either. And I keep track of what was deleted, like knowledge of lobotomies, amnestic drugs, the words "torture" and "abduction", the definition of the Sapir-Whorf thesis (which must therefore be called a law, it applies to itself, and it was proven true as I recovered from this lobotomy), they also erased the words "personal injury lawyer" and "malpractice".
It's like the only thing they care about really is that you never reach the courtroom and sue.
Yeah good docs aren't as incredibly rare as they seem from the wards, which they're not allowed into under "fuck the law" terms. Weird that they exist, I've had so many.
Of course a good psych is like finding a ten dollar bill on the sidewalk, whereas a shrink is getting mugged. They don't have the same absolute value.
> and good psychs will just refuse. But they won't turn the guardian in
This. And then they'll just try another one.
Eventually one accepts the bribe and then it's set in stone because EVERY other professional will demand to read the previous "diagnosis" and they'll almost never deviate.
Just imagine if when you went for a second opinion on your radiology exams the new doctor demanded to know the previous diagnosis before making his own.
You'd laugh out loud because of the bias.
In psych fields it's considered the default and not doing it might actually be considered malpractice.
Yeah so the shrinks, like Ximena Rojas Núñez, who verbally apologized for malpractice when caught (I just can't protect the guilty if it's easier to name them than not, some are actually worth some respect, not her, she was just embarrassingly stupid), so her, from the very beginning was informing about me looking for a second opinion, like fucking Daniel Cussen twitter. Had to show a different, superior doctor like ten pages of confessions for him to consider I was in the right.
And that's why I talk about this all publicly, I care a lot about my privacy and THEREFORE I share this, so that it isn't known exclusively by the people I hate the most, by traitors of patients. Privacy isn't nobody knowing your secrets, well obviously it is but at this point that's a fantasy. Says right on the box cryptography is about forcing the government [or anybody else] to torture you. Beyond that point? Cryptography is useless. In fact I used 1Password diligently before, during and after getting tortured, back in 2009. Really liked the app, good placebo. Didn't add up to shit, and it's not their fault. I voided the warranty.
So you divulge. If the worst people know your secrets, share your secrets. That actually increases your privacy. And it's the perviest thing, they think slandering me will ensure my silence, well it did for a long time, but come on. What is the solution? Literal Daniel Cussen twitter.
Yeah, I do, the last few days, just in my comments. You know what? You came up with a terrific idea, I'll just post stories. I'll need to remove the char limit on my posts though. It's quite relevant to Hacker News I believe, I was super into this forum then, dead set on dropping out of Stanford to do Y Combinator, visited HN every time I had access to the computers, and maybe it can refresh memories.
This is a tangent, but electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) can be very effective for treatment-resistant depression and bipolar.
As far as I know it's not effective for autism, but ECT often gets namedropped for shock value by people who don't like psychiatry, and when it's used appropriately and consensually for disorders it can treat, it doesn't deserve such a bad reputation. The end result is that people tend to be very scared of ECT even when it could probably help them.
The idea of being in the care of malicious caregivers is horrific. I can imagine it skews your worldview in a pessimistic direction. I’m sorry to hear that life was unfair to you. I’m glad to hear that you’re able to approach it with some humor now.
> There is a massive contingent of people that HATE autistic people and feel like it's something to be "fixed". A lot of them frame that hate as helping.
I suspect this has something to do with the fact that many of these have grown up in environments where you are good at technical stuff or you are less than those who are (i.e. the US). They know that many autists will straight smoke their ass in all things STEM and they deeply resent being dealt a losing hand to those "weirdos". Others are just straight up sadists/abusers. The more I hear stories like this, the more I believe the courts practically seek out these sick fucks to be "caregivers" and such. Something is pathologically wrong with this entire area of society.
There was this popular kid in my senior year of high school. Class clown, well dressed, one of the star athletes. We'd been friends in 7th grade but he'd apparently forgotten and didn't talk to me. I was occasionally fodder for his loud jokes in front of the whole class, although the gay kid got it a lot worse than I did.
One day I was fixing one of the computers in the office and he happened by. Nobody was around. He saw what I was doing and apropos of nothing he launched into something like, "You know, this place doesn't matter. Nothing here is real. Out there, a few years from now, you'll be in college, or working for fucking Microsoft or some shit. You know where I'll be? I'll be driving a forklift or changing somebody's oil if I'm lucky." No jokes. No smile.
I left it out because I struggled with how to say it and still don’t know the right way to tell it. I did become a software developer, and I did greatly enjoy my time at Microsoft. It wasn’t happily ever after, but at least it was happily until it wasn’t. He died 15 years later of a brain injury he sustained in a car accident that occurred around the same time we had that encounter. Just awful luck, having nothing to do with anything. I totaled my first car too, only difference was I didn’t hit my head the same way.
> the more I believe the courts practically seek out these sick fucks to be "caregivers" and such
I suspect its worse than that. I suspect courts don't care if the caregiver is a sick fuck, because the sick fuck is offering to fix the problem of a disabled person existing with needs.
I self apply and I also use sperg only on myself. Hell, I use the r word self applied if I'm with friends... if I'm with people that might be offended though I call myself "advanced" but I just imagine the finger quotes and tap them with my feet a little bit splay and quiet twice but I think frequently people miss the timing of the joke and slur.
But if someone compares me to anyone from Big Bang Theory I go off on a rant until they are glazed over about how I'm not trying to diminish the atrocities of slavery or how wrong minstrel shows are but also this is for sure "nerd face" and then wait... just wait... for way later in the party and say bazinga.
Just kidding with the bazinga thing. I'd never say that. It disgusts me.
I suspect "sperg" will get eaten by the euphemism treadmill long before "Autist" ever will be just because the concept of "Aspergers" is medically passe and it's namesake is a rather disagreeable fascist who was perfectly willing to send off any autistic he did not deem worthy off to get murdered by the Nazis amongst other issues and the ones he did deem worthy he considered to be psychopaths.
We can’t decide between ‘autistic person’ and ‘person with autism’ but I gather the former is in the lead. Will get back to you after we sort it at the next AutistiCon.
I think there's is a schism on that point between self-advocating Autistics and Parents of Autistics with more severe issues. The former is indeed in the lead however.
Ok, I wasn't saying it's a tired euphemism. I was saying it's a mean slur used by bigots. I don't totally understand your challenge to provide the latest term, honestly. Are you trying to cast me as the language police?
You almost got it. The point is that is no bigoted language, only bigoted people and bigoted intentions. Mere use of words and languages can not, by itself, be bigoted. You can reasonably infer intention and a person’s character by their word choices, but you can’t call a normal person using a word a bigot merely for using a word which also bigots use.
"Autist" has this sort of duality to it best demonstrated by wallstreetbets culture, where an "Autist" is somebody who will either lose all their money or get wealthy beyond compare. An object of mockery yet an object of admiration, an Elon Musk figure.
Simply stigmatizing whatever words people decide to use in a mean way isn't a real solution to any problem. I resist sacrificing the word "Autist" to the god of the euphemism treadmill because it's the noun form of "Autistic" and is two syllables. If we stigmatize that word we won't address the actual stigma but we will be forced to resort to more pained and awkward language.
It is the most common term I hear from people who "call out" autism disingenuously. It's not about the words or the stigma, it's about the assholes and not repeating their abuse by reusing their words.
>It's not about the words... it's about... their words.
Feels somewhat contradictory.
In terms of abuse, stigmatizing the word "Autist" won't prevent abuse, it will enable it.
Language that expresses negative feelings about a group of people will always exist, all one can do is have influence over the exact language that is used in that expression and the context in which people use certain language. Censorship doesn't stop abuse, it changes how abuse is expressed. In this situation, if we censor "autist", people will still probably continue to use the word, but use it in private more often, and it will become more of a pure slur. People who use the word "Autist" also use "Autistic" as in "Autistic screeching" as a slur/backhanded compliment (And autistic is truly uncensorable) with a very similar connotation, so by stigmatizing "Autist" and giving it a more severe connotation consequently, you are actually increasing peoples ability to more fluently express their distaste of autistics by making the word "Autist" more distinct from "Autistic". Increasing peoples ability to express their distaste for autism more easily is the opposite of what censorship ought to aim to do.
Ever notice how black people can rap and sing about the N word, and say it to each other with at least 5 different meanings communicated just with verbal inflection, but it has exactly one meaning when a white person says it to a black person?
Tbh most adults I meet function at a 12 year old level. Have you ever tried to see an adult do math? I’m talking about adults who aren’t engineers, doctors, etc.
this was exactly what I was worried about reading this article. The return to his parents seems like a terrible thing to celebrate without knowing what exactly happened to motivate him to escape in 2019.
TRIGGER WARNING: Discussion of sexual assault and physical violence in a very provocative manner. Only in the last paragraph noted by `~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*` and also put in italics to make it easier to avoid.
- - - - -
Yes exactly. He has been "lost" for 3 years. He did not want to just hit the road. Children like warm houses unless something very... very... wrong is going on. He was smart enough to make it this far and dodge getting his name picked up. This article glorifies returning him to caregivers AS AN ADULT and frames him like he's some mank moron.
The family are likely to now, in perpetuity forever, have absolute power over him AS AN ADULT that can't be broken without the order of a judge; likely at a county level, if you want to know what that means... look it up, and it appears no one cares in the reporting. The family will be able to draw a caretaker paycheck from this too.
Even if he does love them and was just... lost or something? The facts in this case are terrifying and it is spelled out in black and white. He would rather never have a name and freeze to death than see them again.
We are, in this thread, I suspect, caring more than anyone anywhere does. This happens to so many people, every day. Lets talk about a pretty woman who I'd guess is neuro typical and is in the public eye for having broken a conservatorship... Britany Spears. Apply that to someone who doesn't have here fame and resources and just got called by the newspaper a slack jawed moron for having just wandered around and not died.
He can stay alive and hide his name for 3 years on the street. I have a feeling he could write some shitty python scripts and make $300,000 a year... but now he's put into the hands of who did him wrong and there is a state paper trail and it's going to be functionally impossible to get him out of that if he wants to all while incentivizing his care takers to keep him looked at as an idiot so they can draw a check.
I am not saying anyone involved feels that way or abuse has happened. I'm saying that the facts stated are happening and undoing the removal of agency with no question from this young man is unconscionable.
Yes... This does assume something VERY negative about the family.
~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*
If he is ever able to exercise his agency, we will never hear about it and it will take years. How did you spend your 18-38? Was it being beaten with appliance cords by a drunk raping uncle who is just so pissed about how you're such a spaz all the time? Yeah, I'm sure the wheels of justice will just sort this out and it's all fuckin' fine.
My brother is literally the best person I know. He has the patience of a stone, the compassion of a saint and bends over backwards to make sure his family's needs are met.
His son is autistic, and will, given the slightest opportunity, walk out of the house and wander off. It's just something he does, no matter where he is or who he is with (local day cares refused to take him after awhile because they literally couldn't keep the kid safe from himself wandering or climbing after a certain point).
I worry for my nephew, because he has literally no sense of self preservation, and he is growing fast. At some point, he may need to be put in a group home, because he is nearly his mother's size (she's fairly short anyway) and my brother is the primary breadwinner for the family.
Don't wag your klep when you've nothing at all to go on about someone.
> Can your "no preservation" nephew lie to cops for years and push a shopping cart and feed himself denying what his real name is when questioned.
In his case, he doesn't comprehend spoken language enough to carry a conversation. He can answer some basic questions, and says a few words to explain his wants, but he couldn't tell you his own last name. He can memorize and very accurately reenact conversations in cartoons or YouTube videos well after seeing it (they found that out when he rather inappropriately started quoting Spaceballs at school, which he apparently watched at some point).
As for this kid who disappeared for a few years? I don't know anything about him. I don't know anything about his parents, or his home life. Neither does the person I responded to, and neither do you.
To say that this is a terrifying scenario is just projecting.
Yup, I’ve been mostly justifiably conditioned to believe that the overwhelming vast majority of missing persons reports for people 12-25ish are likely people running from abuse. Typically unfathomably horrendous abuse.
A few days ago there was an Ask HN about how do you get along with your parents [1].
I've been reading a lot about this and other related topics, like how does one deal with narcissistic parents, which is a common thing actually. There's a lot of abuse that no one notices as it is not immediately evident as other sorts of abuse (i.e. physical, sexual, etc...), child neglect is so widespread nowadays that I'd consider it an epidemic.
I recall reading a testimony of a child who was constantly and severely emotionally abused and he was talking about how come none of the other adults around him realized what was going on, even though he "was showing all the signs of living in an abusive household". The thing is that all of these signs are quite subtle and you have to know what you're looking for in order to start noticing them. For instance, the kid who almost never wants to be noticed, who is quite "shy", who is always complying with everybody may be under a chronic situation of ridiculing, demeaning or derogatory remarks at home, which has modeled this behavior and, sadly, stunted his emotional and social development.
As I was reading this story, I couldn't stop thinking about how the boy would rather risk it into the wild rather than just coming back to his parents, for three years. This is a huge red flag, honestly, and while it doesn't necessarily imply wrongdoing from the parent's side it is definitely something that should be looked at with a lot of care and empathy for him. Sometimes, not even parents are aware of the kind of damage that they could be causing by choosing to behave in a way they consider to be "normal".
I wish the boy the best, he still has his whole life ahead of him and I hope he finds his place in this world soon and without much trouble.
You know what, I don’t talk about it… at all. It wasn’t until 20 years later and after I’d moved to a different continent and started seeing a therapist for completely unrelated reasons, but the therapist asked me what my childhood was like.
I’d always thought mine was “fine” or “normal”. Divorced parents, like my friends. Younger brother and I living with our mother, like my friends. Aggressively “middle class”, like my friends.
I described one time how my mother would (frequently) get home from a long day at work, not ask how our days were, start cooking dinner (Hamburger Helper or similar), and then one of us kids would ask an innocent question and she would fly off the handle. Turn off the stove mid-meal, storm to her room and slam the door.
There was always plenty of cereal, sandwich meat, and canned soup in the house, so it’s not like we went hungry. Again, I thought it was normal.
I’m now very closely approaching 40 and finally coming to terms with what that seemingly insignificant thing (to her) did to me. I’m not expecting every parent to have a guidebook for survival with kids, but WTF.
Hey, at least I ended up being fiercely independent and learned to cook. I’m sure this kid (man now) will soldier through… he’s obviously survived this long on his own.
It's good that you are opening to discuss and go through this. The point is not to hold a grudge against anybody but to learn and become a better person onwards. Perhaps you have or will have kids one day and then you'll be able to have a better time with them and that alone will make it worth it.
>at least I ended up being fiercely independent and learned to cook.
This, fortunately or unfortunately, is one of the outcomes of growing up like that. You learn to do on your own and become very resilient. That usually pays off later in life, so it has some sort of a silver lining.
> It's good that you are opening to discuss and go through this.
Is it? I don't intend to hijack OP's particular story but I'm actually very interested in this assertion and I know nothing of the scientific evidence for psychology. So this is an honest question not a troll...
Is it actually good for people to "open up" and "work through" things? I know that's the accepted wisdom, but what good has it been proven to do? Are you actually more likely to become a better person? How is that measured?
